Amy Cuddy
- “Trust is the conduit of influence; it’s the medium through which ideas travel.”
Amy Cuddy Speaker Biography
How can we improve our relationships, performance, and wellbeing by harnessing our personal power and taking control of our own thoughts, feelings, and actions?
Dr. Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist, bestselling author, and keynote speaker. Her writing, research, teaching, and speaking focus on presence and performance under stress, the causes and outcomes of feeling powerful vs. powerless, prejudice and stereotyping, nonverbal behavior, the delicate balance of projecting trustworthiness and strength, and most recently, the psychology of bullying, bystanding, and social bravery.
After earning her Ph.D. at Princeton University, she was a professor at Harvard Business School (2008-2017) and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (2006-2008).
Throughout her academic career, she’s been honored with some of the highest commendations for both her teaching and her research, including the Excellence in Teaching Award from Harvard University (2018) and the Scientific Impact Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (2022) for her extensive research on intergroup conflict. She continues to teach as a guest lecturer in Executive Education at Harvard Business School and at UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Her 2012 TED Talk, “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are,” is the second-most popular of all time, with more than 70 million views. Her NYT bestseller, Presence, described in the NYT Sunday Book Review as “…concrete and inspiring, simple but ambitious – above all, truly powerful,” has sold more than half a million copies and been published in 35 languages. In 2025, she will publish her next book, Bullies, Bystanders, & Bravehearts (HarperCollins), on the psychology of bullying among adults — and how we find the courage and tools to stop it.
She’s also an avid roller skater and skier, live-music lover (actually, a devoted Deadhead!), adventuring partner to her husband Paul, and hype mom to her son, Jonah, a guitarist, producer, songwriter, and student at Berklee College of Music. She lives in Venice, California.
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Speech Topics
Personal Power & Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges
Many of our biggest challenges call for us to be calmly confident, focused, and open to hearing others. Too often, we approach these high-pressure interactions with fear, execute with anxiety and distraction, and leave with regret. Based on her best-selling book , Amy draws from psychology and neuroscience research, personal narratives, and her own Presence, focusing on:
- What holds us back from being present and effective in these challenging situations?
- How does feeling powerless (vs. powerful) affect our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, in turn undermining our ability to be smart, creative, attentive, and effective when we most need to be?
- How do we retrain our nervous systems to liberate us — rather than inhibit us — in these moments?
- How does our own presence help others to be present — and facilitate the building of trust in stressful interactions?
- What does powerful vs. powerless body language look like?
- Can we adapt our own body language — breathing, speech patterns, simple and complex posture, and movement — to directly affect how powerful we feel (and how powerful we appear to others)?
Audiences will be moved and inspired, leaving Amy’s keynote with a fresh, life-changing perspective on themselves and their interactions, and a concrete and immediately-actionable set of simple techniques to harness their own personal power and presence, freeing them to perform and interact at their very best — and empower others to do the same.
The Science and Social Impact of Bravery — and How We Can Use it to End Bullying
Social media is a rocket fuel for our worst impulses, says Amy Cuddy, exacerbating incivility and bullying among adults both online and offline. But the same psychological mechanisms that elicit bullying – tribalism, the influence of norms, and desire for status – can just as easily be used to decrease bullying and increase bravery. The same human tendencies that are activated for bad, argues Cuddy, can be activated for good.
“Now, more than any other time, we have the science – and the stories – to build a brand-new program to fight against this menace,” Cuddy says.
In this talk, based on her forthcoming book, Bullies, Bystanders, and Bravehearts (HarperCollins, 2025) she covers the staggering psychological, physical, and socio-economic costs of bullying to individuals, organizations, and societies – and the unprecedented and surprising opportunities we have to engage in and lead through social bravery. She compellingly demonstrates that when we understand the psychology of these dynamics, virtually all of us will have the power to be bravehearts, rather than passive bystanders.
A renowned social psychologist, Cuddy shares an acute combination of scientific expertise and first-hand experience, drawing both from her personal journey and the stories of others to communicate important human truths.
With urgency and hope, she uncovers the psychological levers that trigger bullying, provides a fascinating and unique lens on its toll, and inspires audiences to galvanize their own bravery so we can all be better together.
Identity and Intergroup Conflict: Exploring the Anatomy of Bias in a Divided World
For more than twenty years, Amy Cuddy has been studying and writing about intergroup bias and the psychological underpinnings of how we judge and treat others.
She breaks down who and why we envy, pity, admire, and hate. Why do we bend over backwards to help some people – while turning a blind eye to the mistreatment of others? Why do we assume some people will be allies and others, predators? And how do those feelings and interactions affect how we see ourselves, and how we feel and behave in the future?
As her primary area of research, Cuddy draws from a deep well of knowledge and science to present a powerful and provocative evidence-based discussion that helps audiences understand how bigotry often plays a starring role in prejudice and workplace mobbing.
Our biases – whether simple or complex – impact the quality of our interactions and our productivity at work, says Cuddy. With potency and warmth, she shares with audiences how to reject and transcend stereotypes that divide and disempower, so that we can band together to categorically reject harassment and bullying at work.
How to Lead with Confidence and Be More Influential
From the classroom to the boardroom, nonverbal behavior directly impacts the levels of trustworthiness and strength we present to others—and to ourselves—in our daily interactions. Social psychologist, award-winning teacher and best-selling author Amy Cuddy shares the groundbreaking and compelling research for which she has garnered national acclaim to teach audiences how to become more influential in their personal and professional lives. Explaining how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments influence people, Cuddy examines how leaders can use this cutting-edge science to prepare the brain for high-stakes situations, perform at their best and empower others to do the same.
Moving Forward in the Flux Era: From Flux Syndrome to Flux Recovery
The pandemic and concurrent economic and cultural shifts have propelled workers and leaders into a new “Flux Era.” This new and ongoing flux has created a stew of conflicting emotions — hope, fear, excitement, dispiritedness, relief, and tension. And although human beings are more resilient than we generally appreciate, this psychological tilt-a-whirl has caused many of us to feel a loss of agency, leading us to make rash decisions. With her extensive background in cutting-edge behavioral science and research, Amy Cuddy offers answers in this groundbreaking and energizing talk on the workforce’s most top-of-mind questions around returning to work, such as:
- How do we approach returning to the office in this new era?
- How do we handle contentious conversations about how to return to work?
- How do we create workplace environments and cultures that are welcoming and inclusive to people working both in-person and virtually?
- And how do we re-empower and reset our employees so that they can thrive in the Flux Era?
Combining her openness and warmth with her deep expertise, Amy delivers this timely speech on how to come to terms with and thrive in these tumultuous times.
